PAF Alternatives?

KDunn99 said:

Jimmy didnt have any push/pulls or pickguard buttons on any of his guitars until The Firm...

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+1

From @MikeSlub right here in 2004 he said Edwin Wilson got to measure Jimmy Page's guitar pickups in England and he stated:

They did measure the output of the pickups, and from faint memory I remember Edwin saying the bridge was about 8.2 and the neck was 7.9.

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Maybe @MikeSlub could further explain this? I'm still new here but I know Mike usually has proof of his claims. There's an infinite amount of contradictory claims about every aspect of Page

Also according to Edwin Wilson, the stock neck PAF was replaced in the 2000’s with a 1960 PAF which makes sense that it would be 7.9k. Edwin believes Jimmy’s number 1 is a late 1959 or early 1960, so maybe some of the people who know more about common PAF specs through the years could chime in about what could be in a les paul from that time frame

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KDunn99 said:

Also according to Edwin Wilson, the stock neck PAF was replaced in the 2000’s with a 1960 PAF which makes sense that it would be 7.9k. Edwin believes Jimmy’s number 1 is a late 1959 or early 1960, so maybe some of the people who know more about common PAF specs through the years could chime in about what could be in a les paul from that time frame

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Well, that's exactly the point: the PAFs from exactly this time frame, 1957-1960, and certainly 1959-1960, can have a wide range of ohm/resistance readings. It would not be unexpected to see original, unmodified PAFs from this short window of time to have readings from as low as 7.3 to highs of 9.3 or more. The white bobbins (dbl white/zebra) indicate a 1959-1960 time frame. Jimmy Page had a double white in the bridge of #1 before it needed to be replaced early in 1972. (His LP Custom (1960?) had a zebra in the neck.)

From cfh's informative website we read "When the bobbins are wound with more than a nominal amount of wire (either on purpose or by accident), they are more powerful with fatter midrange but less treble. Due to the human factor and the wide tolerance of the manually-run pickup winding machines used by Gibson from 1956-1961, PAF pickups usually measure between 7.5 and 9.0 thousand ohms (K ohms). By 1962 (the end of the PAF era), Gibson was making pickups very consistently with 7.5k ohms of wire (give or take .25k ohms)." Link to website: http://www.guitarhq.com/paf.html

To further add to the mystery and confusion is the fact that Gibson used several different varieties of magnets in the PAFs from the late '50s! There are many, many variables in the PAF formula. cfh's website is really worth the read.